John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Articles & Media

I’m Fine And Other Lies!!!

by Russell Friedman & John W. James of The Grief Recovery Institute

Approximately 20% of your ability to communicate is verbal, leaving about 80% as non-verbal.

Non-verbal communication includes tone of voice as well as facial and body signals. When our verbal and non-verbal signals do not match, most people will respond to the non-verbal. So when you lie, most people can SEE it.

A common thread running through the articles we write is the mis-information we were all subjected to about processing the normal emotions caused by loss. We don’t want to create any new loss issues by blaming our parents in particular or society in general for having passed on ineffective ideas, skills, and tools for dealing with loss.

What we want to do is establish that what we have been using to process our sad, painful or negative feelings hasn't worked, and that we need to acquire more effective tools for dealing with loss events, particularly when someone important to us dies.

Much of the incorrect information we learned and practiced may have convinced us not to show our REAL feelings at any cost. We were taught to bury any feelings that dealt with sadness. We were taught: “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.”

This and hundreds of other cliches about dealing with sad feelings taught us to lie about how we felt. And even the lying was protected under other mis-information like: “Don't burden others with your feelings.”

When we make public appearances we often ask a large audience this question: “Do you like being lied to?” Of course no one says yes. Our next question is: “How many of you have ever said I'M FINE when you were feeling terrible?” Every single hand in the audience goes up.

Every time we lie to others we lie to ourselves. Our subconscious mind hears the lie and continues to bury the feelings generated by the initial event. Unresolved losses are cumulative, and cumulatively negative.

In as much as time does not heal the pain caused by loss, neither does lying about our feelings. It would be impossible to cure such a massive problem in a single article, but let's try for a little bit of improvement. Allow yourself to believe that the subconscious mind will take actions based on conscious commands. When we lied and said we were fine we told our mind there was no problem so it need not search out a solution. The net effect is to allow the cause of the problem to go unattended and re-bury itself.

The next time it attacks we may not be able to recognize the cause or source of the attack. A major key to dealing with your grief is to process every feeling in the moment you have it. It does not require any special skills to tell the truth about what you’re feeling. For example: “How are you?” “I'm having a tough day, thanks for asking.”

Notice that the answer is truthful but does not invite any help or advice. It also has the capacity of serving notice that you are not on your game and the other party can respond accordingly. When you say “I'm fine,” but you're not, you have sent a very confusing message.